Advertising on College Campuses

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Are you trying to make an organization known on your college campus? It can be a difficult challenge to overcome to get the exposure you’re looking for. The following are some of my experiences as well as a couple pointers from another young entrepreneur and blogger, Yaro Starak, who has had experience trying to advertise his business, Better Edit, on college campuses in Canada and Australia.

The first important step that you should take when trying to market your organization or a business in general that focuses on college students, is to make sure your advertisements stand out. If you’re printing up flyers on plain white paper, this is your first mistake. You are going to want to use bright bold colors to draw attention to your flyer. A lot of schools will offer to their clubs/organizations the ability to make free copies on any color paper or even colored copies. When “flyering” a campus, it is important to remember that most people are seeing your flyer just as they pass by on the way to class or through a dorm building. Therefore, be sure to quickly and clearly state what the flyer is for.

The next big thing I would suggest would be to take advantage of every building on your campus. Most buildings that are not considered residence halls will have cork boards where you can hang your posters or flyers up and get them seen. Through my personal experience, many universities require that your flyer get approved by an Office of Residential Life or something similar. This causes problems if you are advertising for business purposes, but if you are trying to get some students to an event or meeting, it should not be a problem. If you are advertising for a business, you may want to look into the option of sliding flyers under the doors of the dorm rooms. I would definitely suggest either seeking approval for this or at least see if it would be a problem or violation.

My final tip is that repetition is key! When you hang a flyer on a cord board or somewhere, many times, someone from the university will clear the board off every week (usually every Friday afternoon/evening). So, be sure you check back to the locations in which you hung the flyers and re-hang any if necessary.

Now here are a couple quick tips from Yaro of Small Business Branding and Entrepreneur’s Journey for an effective postering campaign.

Some of the variables to be considered when poster advertising includes:
* Time of year
* Demographics at a university
* Poster positioning
* Poster market competitiveness
* Poster design
* What you advertise

In my experience the large outdoor carousel poles that are covered in posters are not worthwhile for small business. For basic A4 posters I do not recommend you waste your time with them, I don’t. For large corporate business with big marketing budgets – movies, video games, food and beverage companies etc that can afford to print massive full color glossy posters and plaster them all over the poles it can be effective. The problem is they compete for space and sometimes it only takes a few hours before a new poster takes over, then a few hours later another. That’s a lot of money to spend on very little ‘face time’.

Yaro also has a Top 10 List of Campus Poster Advertising Tips:
1. Test your poster performance by using different posters.
2. Try different sizes.
3. Keep it simple, stupid.
4. Focus on benefits.
5. Be nice.
6. Don’t get angry.
7. Use staples with a staple gun.
8. Don’t be shy.
9. Don’t go crazy either.
10. Stick to the edges on popular boards.

You can see some brief descriptions of each of the above tops at Student-Marketing.com.au.

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